Time for Canada to stop singing Kumbaya and capture a far larger share of Asia’s economic boom

MUMBAI — As happened about a decade ago with China, Canada has been slow to realize the benefits of capturing a share of India’s $2 trillion a year economy.

With a tantalizing number like that, the Conservative government has been right to make increasing Canada’s foreign trade, especially in Asia, a top priority. But this policy has only become evident in the past 15 months through high profile trade missions such as the one Prime Minister Stephen Harper embarks on next week to the sub-continent.

This dramatic shift should have and might have happened a few years earlier. But the Conservatives were hamstrung in a minority government where the desire of some Liberals and many New Democrats was for Canada to continue singing Kumbaya and telling the world how to behave.

Canada’s giddy prospects for greater trade with Asia were brought home a few days ago when, unbidden, one of India’s mostly highly regarded strategic thinkers told me that aside from Germany and some legacy connections to Britain, his country seldom thought much about Europe any more except in a few fields such as aviation. The western countries that mattered were the U.S., Canada and Australia. This was because they have resources and products that India needs.

Like China, everything about India is big. One of many dazzling statistics is that India has over 900 million cell phone subscribers — a number many times higher than Canada’s total population. Despite the opportunities presented by a society where tens of millions have recently joined the middle classes, those Canadian companies already in India believe that many Canadian companies still tend to be risk averse and overly content to regard foreign trade as doing deals in the U.S.

For all that, the successes of some major Canadian companies show what is possible if more Canadian businessmen make Asia an object of desire.

Bombardier, which in various forms has been in India for four decades, is a blue chip example. To fend off keen competition from Asian and European rivals, the Montreal-based multi-national company has built two railway manufacturing sites in India. Its Indian subsidiary has mostly completed a contract to deliver 614 Metro cars to Delhi, is providing carriages to three other Indian subway systems, exporting railway bogeys to Australia and assembling locomotives for sale in southeast Asia and the Middle East. It is also supplying traffic management systems for railways operating out of Mumbai which carry seven million passengers every weekday and is exploring building monorails in Chennai, Kerala and Delhi.

Bombardier has also begun to have some success in India’s highly competitive aviation market. It is about to finish delivering 15 Q400 turbo prop aircraft to India’s SpiceJet for $450 million. An option that may be exercised in the next few weeks could double the size of that order.

Another positive sign is that after entirely missing out on the beginning of China’s rise in the early 1990s, several dozen Canadian automotive suppliers including the biggest — Aurora, Ont.-based Magna International — now have established Indian operations.

“It used to be: ‘Why India?’ It is now ‘How do we get into India?’” said Mike Manson, chief executive officer of TaraSpan, a technology company in Ottawa’s western suburb of Kanata which has offices in four Indian cities.

“We have heard all the Canadian excuses and reservations. It was far too competitive, it was far too expensive and this constant: we don’t know where to start.”

To help them, TaraSpan, which Manson runs with co-founder Raj Narula of Kanata, provides advice and connections for Canadian high tech companies trying to establish a foothold in India. Since starting five years ago, the company has signed up 15 Canadian clients, gone from four employees to 170 and seen its business grow by more than 60 per cent every year.

“One of the strategies that Canadian companies have been missing is that by partnering with emerging Indian global powerhouses they can ride their coattails as they expand around the world,” Manson said.

But India is a different place. Outsiders cannot change it. They must adapt.

“The advice we give our clients is to practise the three Ps. Presence, persistence and patience,” the electrical engineer and former senior vice-president of Alcatel said. “One mistake Canadian companies make is they come, see the opportunities here, make some connections and then go home and try to drive it from there.

“The Indian bureaucracy can also be a hurdle. That is why it is so important to have a presence here and local people who understand that bureaucracy and the rules and regulations.”

If Canadian businessmen and politicians could listen to Manson for a few minutes they would likely catch his infectious fever.

“This market is growing massively, creating crazy opportunities for India and the world,” he said. “Every time I step off the plane I can immediately sense the buzz. It is electrifying to be here.”

Matthew Fisher is Postmedia's international affairs columnist and Canada's longest serving foreign correspondent. He has lived and worked abroad for 31 years in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and... read more, more recently, Afghanistan. His assignments have taken him to 162 countries, all U.S. states, Canadian provinces and territories, above the North Pole and to an iceberg over the Magnetic North Pole. During his travels he has been an eyewitness to 19 wars and conflicts. The personal highlight of his career as a roaming correspondent was when he attended Nelson Mandela's inauguration in Pretoria.View author's profile